The workload of an intensive is, as the name implies, intense. For me the change in pace was a little less great because I had just got up to Day 370 in a 365 for poetry however I had never seriously attempted play or screen writing before. In fact my prior attempts involved improper formats aggravated by “actors” who refused to do the necessary work and the few actors who were insistent upon doing there acting also decided that they should be the director and the writer and changed the work into an unfathomable abomination.
That said these intensives come off from me writing in a poetic matter and we very little experience writing for other people to perform. Perhaps this is why I found our first task of writing our most memorable argument so it fills up 6 pages and then cut anything that can be seen as unnecessary and lower it to a single page. I can no longer say that I find this difficult and I can say that I find it necessary as I do find myself going off into unnecessary details in my head from time to time.
From there the next memorable upgrade to my brain obtained from the intensives would have to be Pinter. For the curious and/or uninitiated, Pinter is a writer who is famous for his use of such things as silence, pauses and the infamous “...”. Somehow I found his indirect style easy to work with and was able to write in it very well. To this time a good portion of my work has continued to use the style that was introduced to us when we worked with his style and I feel like it is very complimentary of my own style.
I also find now that I am a much faster and better writer. Where as last summer while I could create a five page poem in roughly six minutes I could create six pages of script in twenty minutes. As you can see this is a very large discrepancy. The current time for my script writing for six pages is more akin to four to six minutes when I have an idea of what I'm doing and who my characters are. The scripts are also of a much better quality and no longer has what feels like dialogue that has been forced through the characters mouth and they have begun to take on their own qualities of characters much separate from myself.
Starting out in these intensives I had some reserve of putting down myself on page with absolutely no change. Then came time for the monologues and the first subject was one where the character breaks down crying in the middle of it. For it I wrote what I knew and I would have to say that the end result was amazing, especially after I handed it off to Andrew and he performed it. He put a level of understanding on it that really drove it home, especially for me. I had heard what I needed to hear for months and only because the intensives made me write it down on paper. Now I feel a new courage in my writing, that I should not fear what I write.
As one can see the intensives allowed me to stop being a coward in my writing, develop the voices of my characters and how long it takes to write a script as well as what is and isn't important to have in the script. Because of this work I know have a movie in my head which I have developed into three acts with plot points and while it is still on the drawing board I do not feel that I would have had the ability to do this with out the intensives.
As always thank you,
Mike Hand
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